“Exciting expose of parole racket,” The Wayward Girl (not to be confused with The Wayward Girl starring Liv Ullmann) is a 1950s crime movie through and through. The poster art, especially the color-version, is fairly lurid in mood.
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A stunningly sad, desperate, and atmospheric movie, Sunset Boulevard is a flashback narrated by a dead guy, the one you see floating in the middle of the pool at the beginning. How can you not love a story narrated by a dead guy? And he’s not even a zombie. He’s just really dead. How refreshing. You can read my review.
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It looks like this pressbook for Secret Service in Darkest Africa took quite a trip through the jungle itself. The large format, and at 12 pages, it does still stands out as a promotional seller for this sequel to G-Men vs. the Black Dragon by Republic. This time around the Nazis provide the villainy.
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Secret Service in Darkest Africa (1943)
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I’m sure this pressbook was originally eight pages, but six is all I have for now until I can track down another copy. The East Side Kids were quite a movie franchise, especially if you count their various iterations (Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, Bowery Boys) along the way to Monogram. I will say the East Side Kids were my favorite grouping. The ensemble wordplay and relationships were always fun to watch, even if the story wasn’t top-notch. Sure, Monogram didn’t have a lot of money to kick around, but they made a lot of good, entertaining movies anyway. Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison shows of his hoofing talents in this one.
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To see William Powell at the peak of his detection skills, go no further than The Thin Man series. Interestingly, the pressbook tries to play up the humor angle, given Powell’s Nick Charles whimsy, but this movie left much of that on the dock before it shipped to theaters.
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Frankie Darro and Mantan Moreland team up in another Monogram comedy that mixes the usual 1940s tropes (like gangsters and soda jerks for instance). Darro gets top-billing, Moreland (his “colored crony,” “colored cohort”), barely a nod, though the two made a good team up. The Shake It Up with Soda Store Stunts! is informative. I would have loved to have seen Skello in the theater lobby, for sure.
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If Larry "Buster" Crabbe is in it, it must be good. He plays a detective after stolen bonds worth two million dollars, which in today's money is a lot more. Red Barry was a comic strip by Will Gould. No relation to Chester Gould who did Dick Tracy. William Gould played Commissioner Tom (again, no relation to either Goulds), and Rita Gould played Mama Sonia (once again, no relation to the other Goulds either). That's a lot of unrelated Goulds. The pressbook has a neat appearance with a centerfold spread of promotional ideas.
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Frankie Darro starred (more or less with the dog, Rinty) in The Wolf Dog (1933) serial and other actioners from Mascot. He had a big role in The Phantom Empire serial in 1935. His small stature and youthful looks kept him into young roles for a while until his age caught up with him. He also starred, along with Mantan Moreland, in movies like this one for Monogram. He also did a lot of television work. Notably, Mantan Moreland receives barely a mention in the pressbook as an “ace colored comic.” Moreland was, for a moment, considered as a replacement for Shemp in the Three Stooges, but that did not happen. He would have been awesome.
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The Red Ace pressbook, which is the oldest one in my collection so far (from 1917), is one of the most beautifully conceived pressbooks I’ve seen, with wonderful use of color, graphics, and text fonts. Size-wise, it’s rather small at 12.5 x 7 inches, but it packs quite a visual wallop; and, certainly, that old world, flourishy, charm in its design is nostalgic.
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Here's the colorful theater herald for the 15-chapter serial, The Red Ace (1917), from Universal.
Johnny Weismuller (who played Tarzan) did 16 Jungle Jim movies. While his acting style lacked much (though it made him perfect for Tarzan), the usual jungle mischief would provide the action. In this one, the locals need to relocate so an atom bomb test can go off and destroy their homes and livelihood. And I’d think much of the jungle animals too, for that matter. Those 1950s were tough.
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An all-talking production! Boy, that must have been quite a thrill to theater audiences when talking pictures replaced the silents. Earlier pressbooks used newsprint, which didn’t hold up well over the years; but this one for Murder on the Roof has lots of promotion, with newspaper ads, a book tie-in, and fashions to highlight.
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